s words: when Shelley cries in his despair--

"Fresh spring, and summer, and winter hoar,
Move my faint heart with grief, but with delight
No more--O never more!"

it is no mere cry of the heart: the mind is in it too: and neither in
him nor in Wordsworth can you get the two apart again after the poet
has joined them together.

Now, though in _Paradise Regained_ the intellect is not allowed, as in
much eighteenth-century poetry, to become so dominant as to make us
feel that prose and not verse was the proper medium for what the poet
had to say, yet it does play a greater part than it can commonly play
with safety, perhaps a greater part than it plays in any other English
poem of the first rank. It is only Milton's unfailing gift of poetic
style which saves the situation. He could do what Wordsworth could
not: conduct long discussions on abstract questions without descending
from the note of poetry to that of the lecture-room. The gallant
explorer who fights his way through the _Prelude_ and the _Excursion_
wins, as he deserves, a great reward, and a greater still if he does it
a second time and a third, {229} when he has learnt that they both have
marshy valleys into which he need not twice descend. But he has paid a
price for the lesson, paid it in the endurance of a great deal of solid
and heavy prose. That is partly because Wordsworth often thinks
without feeling or imagining: he gives us his thought as it is in
itself, as a professor of moral philosophy gives it, without passing it
through the transforming processes of the emotions and the imagination.
These hardly fail Milton half a dozen times in all his poetry: and the
result is the difference between such lines as--

"This is the genuine course, the aim, and end
Of prescient reason; all conclusions else
Are abject, vain, presumptuous, and perverse:"

and such as Milton writes when he is nearest to bare thinking--

"Who therefore seeks in these
True wisdom, finds her not, or by delusion
Far worse, her false resemblance only meets,
An empty cloud."

The difference is also partly due to what, indeed, is another side of
the same distinction; the fact that Wordsworth has not and Milton has a
constant possession of the great or grand style. This is plain in such
passages as those just quoted: it is plainer still where the poets come
close to each other in {230} descriptive passages; as, for instance, in
Wordsworth's--

"Ne